Hello, my name is Sandy. I'm an artist in Perth, Western Australia.

What would a relationship be like without words?

In the intro to A Birthday Song, the poster mentions that her parents were from two different backgrounds and don’t speak each other’s native language. I don’t know many different-language couples – might have encountered one or two while growing up. I imagine it’s rare nowadays, but when marriages were more about business, the bride and groom might not have even had the opportunity to communicate beforehand.

A relationship without common verbal language at first seems restrictive, makes me feel a little claustro-anxious. How could you talk about your aspirations and worries, how could you ask for the exact help you need? Though I suppose that’s still difficult even when you both speak the same language – when you know someone expects (or is expected) to be precise with their wording, you might expect (or be expected) to put less effort into understanding what they mean.

Read the rest of this post…

Permalink. Posted 31 December, 2010. Tagged: cats, communication, language, thinking too much.

Mum made homemade charsiew for Christmas lunch. It was AWESOME, along with her perfect-texture potato salad, sweet chilli pickles, tempura prawns, mango sambal, chicken curry and noodles. Pretty shiok considering our original plan was simple salads and cold cuts. She said she just started making one thing, then another, then another. Her relaxed, creative mood just ran away with her. I love my family. ^___^

After main lunch was over, we sat around, grazing on pickles and end-pieces, talking about random things. The conversation, much to my delight, steered towards dealing with people, which is totally my thing at the moment. Admittedly, a fair bit of struggle over the last couple of years has been because of not knowing what to do with difficult people; or rather, people responding in certain ways to difficult situations.

Read the rest of this post…

Permalink. Posted 26 December, 2010. Tagged: christmas, food, thinking too much.

I promised you a spicy fake bibimbp sauce recipe. It’s not spectacular, just okay and balances out the rest of the dish reasonably well.

The secret is in the proportions. You’ll have to play around with it to get it just right, but your two base ingredients are ketchup and sriracha chilli sauce. This gives you the spicyness and tang. Next, you’ll want some kicap manis (sweet soy); I’m not really sure why, but it just doesn’t really taste right without it. And finally, a tiny dash of light soy sauce.

If you cooked your beef or seasoned your veggies in a particular type of oil (like sesame), stir a little bit into your sauce too. I don’t really know if this does anything, but the superstitious side of me likes to think that keeping a common ingredient between your dish and your dressing helps them mix well. I’ll let you know if I find a more scientific way to figure this out, but for now, that’s my black magic.

When you’re done admiring your beautiful dinner in the bowl, add this spicy fake sauce to your fervent stirring and enjoy.

Permalink. Posted 23 December, 2010. Tagged: cheapness, cooking, food.

I’m sitting in a Chinese restaurant waiting for noodles and blogging on my Windows Phone 7. There’s finally a WordPress-friendly app in the Marketplace. I am content.

Switching from Apple’s sweet bosom of iPhone has taken some getting used to. The most notable difference being the barren app store, Zune Marketplace. It’s not completely barren, but does lack the selection you can find in the iTunes app store. I think the Android Marketplace might even have more. All this will change, of course, as the WinMo7 gets older. It just makes the phone less addictive in the meantime.

By the way, I’m at home now on the puter. Blogging with the app didn’t go quite as planned. Why is my cat picture so small. :(

Read the rest of this post…

Permalink. Posted 17 December, 2010. Tagged: blogging, mobile, technology, windows phone 7, wordpress.

Every famous chef has their ‘thing’. If I were a famous chef, my ‘thing’ would be simple dinners – food you only need 2 or 3 ingredients for, plus your imagination to create unique variations every night. Tonight, it’s bolognaise (or bolognese).

Bolognaise is my favourite food at the moment. You only need 3 ingredients for a decent basic recipe – meat, tomato, garlic. Unseasoned beef has a nice flavour, crushed tomato is juicy with a nice flavour, garlic ties it all together. Simple.

Of course, it’s not real authentic traditional bolognese, but it is a simple unpretentious, minimalist meat dish to go with pasta – delicious enough on nights when you don’t want a fuss.

Read the rest of this post…

Permalink. Posted 14 December, 2010. Tagged: cooking, food, simple dinners.

My little apartment in East Perth is now available for rent. :)

The place is done up nicely now. I wish we had the motivation to clean it up while we were living there. WE HAVE REAL CURTAINS NOW instead of the dusty, musty old yellow things and draped-up can’t-be-arsed pieces of cloth we had before. Want to see?

• This is what it looked like after some jerk upstairs flooded our floors.
• This is what it looked like after everything got fixed and the floors replaced.
• Picture #3 shows the unfurnished room with new white blinds.

Probably should have mopped before handing over the keys, but lovely Karla at Mark Hay will send a cleaner through before new folk move in.

Read the rest of this post…

Permalink. Posted 4 December, 2010. Tagged: house stuff.